Dead Spy Running

26

Daniel Marchant pushed open the blue door, not sure what to expect. There had been no chowkidar on the front gate, and he knew the house was deserted, but for some reason he hoped that Chandar, the family cook, would be in his little outhouse, on his charpoy, sleeping off the Bagpiper whisky of the night before. It was an absurd thought, he knew. He had last seen Chandar twenty years ago, all four foot nine of him, standing proudly in his baggy High Commission chef whites as he oversaw his Nepali cousins serving chicken curry to his father and mother for their sad, farewell dinner.

The small room was hot and empty. He had forgotten how stifling Delhi could be in May, or perhaps he hadn’t noticed the heat when he was last here, as an eight-year-old child. A bare wire dangled from the ceiling, where once a lightbulb had hung. Apart from that, there was no evidence that anyone, let alone Chandar, had ever called the place home.

The other three staff rooms were similarly empty. Together they formed a single block, set apart from the main house. He struggled to recall who had lived in them all: the mali, he thought, or perhaps the ayah’s smiling brother, who sat behind a humming sewing machine all day in the searing heat. Chandar’s room was the only one he and Sebastian used to enter as children. In the afternoons, when the twins were meant to be sleeping, they would slip past the dozing ayah and help Chandar roll the chapattis he made for his own late lunch. He could still hear the hiss of the blue flame, feel the comfort of the chapattis, folded like warm blankets. Chandar’s wife sometimes came down from Nepal to stay in the tiny room too. The brothers’ visits were never the same when she was around: she scolded Chandar for feeding the sahib’s sons with cheap flour, and pinched their cheeks too hard.

Marchant walked over to the main house and peered in through a window which, like all the others on the ground floor, was protected with ornate metal bars. He remembered the cold marble hall floor, big and smooth enough for him, Sebastian and Chandar to play cricket on, although it was shiny when he lived here, not black and soiled as it was now. How long the house had stood empty he wasn’t sure. The padlock and chain on the front door suggested it must have been for years.

Behind him was the swimming pool. Its bottom was caked with several seasons of big leaves, rotting in a few inches of brackish water. The tiles, once blue and pristine, were chipped or missing, leaving a patchwork of decay. Marchant tried to force the thought away, but an image of Sebastian came into his mind, staring up at him from the bottom of the pool.

As he turned back towards the gate, he became aware of someone watching him, a figure beneath the neem tree on the far side of the lawn, where the generator used to belch out its black smoke. He walked across the brown, untended grass, reaching the trees just in time to see a young boy climb over the wall and drop down into the neighbouring garden.

‘Hey, wait,’ Marchant called, struggling to recall the correct Hindi. ‘Suno, Kya Chandar abhi bhi yahan rahta hai?’ Does Chandar live here any more?

The name ‘Chandar’ seemed to have an effect, even if his Hindi didn’t. The boy’s black hair reappeared above the brick wall a few moments later.

‘Chandar Bahadur?’ he asked tentatively, still partly concealed behind the wall.

‘Tikke,’ Marchant said, smiling. The boy’s whole face had now appeared, and Marchant knew from the glint in his eyes that he was looking at Chandar’s son.

Ten minutes later, Marchant was sitting in the cramped staff quarters of the neighbour’s house, eating chapattis and dhal with Chandar, his wife, who remained standing, covering her head with a scarf, and their only child, Bhim. Chandar’s hair was still jet-black, but there was a tiredness around his eyes that betrayed the passing of twenty years. His English was still terrible (he said the same about Marchant’s Hindi), but the chapattis were as good as ever, and they were soon reminiscing about the baby cobra Chandar had once caught in the compost heap, the rides around the lawn on the handlebars of his ancient Hero bicycle, and the Christmas when he drank too much Bagpiper and forgot to cook the turkey.

Marchant asked about his old family house next door, once one of the grandest in Chattapur, a village seven miles south of New Delhi. His mother had insisted on living off the high commission compound because of the traffic pollution in the centre of the city, even though it had meant a hazardous daily commute for his father in an Ambassador. He knew, too, that his mother would never have made that fateful drive from Chanakyapuri if they had been living in the compound like everyone else.

According to Bhim, who translated his father’s words into near-perfect English, the house had stood empty for a year after the Marchants left, then the landlord’s only son, an IT graduate, had returned from California and moved in with another man. The landlord, a retired army colonel, discovered his prodigal son was gay, chucked him and his boyfriend out, and had let the house stand empty ever since as a symbol of his family’s shame. A smile crept onto the boy’s face when he relayed the last detail. Chandar had moved around Chattapur, cooking his famous chicken curry for various expats, and was now working for a young Dutch family who, by chance, had moved into the house next door.

‘But my father says he will always remember working for Marchant Sahib,’ Bhim said. There was a pause in the conversation as Marchant looked around the tiny room, listening to the clatter of the water cooler by the window, the Bollywood film music coming from the oversized radio-tape recorder in the corner. ‘Is sir still alive?’ Bhim asked, with a sensitivity that suggested he already knew the answer.

‘No, he’s not,’ Marchant said. ‘He died two months ago.’

There was no need for Bhim to translate. Chandar bowed his head for a few moments, staring at the dusty concrete floor, and then started talking animatedly to his wife, who went over to the charpoy and pulled out a metal trunk from underneath it. Marchant watched as she opened the trunk lid and rummaged around inside. A moment later, she handed Chandar a handwritten letter, which he looked at for a token moment, as if reading it, and then passed to his son.

‘My father received a letter from Ramachandran Nair, your father’s driver. He used to live here. Now he is back in Kerala, his home place.’

Marchant remembered the driver’s name — they used to call him Raman — but he couldn’t picture his face. Bhim started reading the letter, his father barking incongruously fierce instructions at him in a way that Marchant suddenly recalled. His memories of Chandar were faint, but he could still remember that sense of contrast: one moment the subservient cook in the company of his father and guests, the next bossing everyone around in the kitchen, where Chandar was king.

‘Ramachandran says your father visited him last year, in the monsoon,’ Bhim said, his eyes scanning down the letter. Marchant felt an imperceptible drying of his mouth. Suddenly there was a new connection between this place he was in and the past of twenty years ago, like the ignition sparking in his father’s old Lagonda.

‘Does he say why my father was there?’ Marchant asked.

There was another pause as Bhim carried on reading.

‘He says he was worried about Marchant Sahib. He looked very tired. He didn’t eat his wife’s curry. “I asked him why he had come to Kerala”’ — Bhim was translating directly from the letter now — ‘“and he told me he had come on family business.”’

Marchant smiled to himself. His father would never have disclosed what he was doing, of course, even to his faithful old driver. He had heard the words ‘family business’ more than once in his childhood, an expression that his father’s generation had used whenever they were referring to state secrets.